


Broken

by bluestbluetoeverblue



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Despair, M/M, Self-Hatred, Short One Shot, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28008231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestbluetoeverblue/pseuds/bluestbluetoeverblue
Summary: Everyone has a soulmate. It was the sort of thing you could count on, the counter to all the death and loss in the world. Everyone has a soulmate and a unique mark tying them to that person. Everyone except Dean Winchester.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 73





	Broken

Dean Winchester was three years old when he asked about the mark on his mother’s wrist. It looked just like the one on his father’s, some strange inked symbol that he had never seen before. When he asked, Mary took a deep breath and told him that the marks meant that John and Mary loved each other and that they were meant to be together. Dean did not think much of it until his baby brother was born with his own strange mark on his left shoulder. That was when Dean started to notice the marks on everyone around him. After searching all over his skin, he finally asked his mom why he didn’t have one. With soft eyes, Mary answered that his destiny was his alone, not to be shared with someone else. She seemed sad as she said it, and Dean didn’t understand. He didn’t want her to be sad, though, so he gave her a hug and didn’t ask about the marks again.

Dean Winchester grew up staring at the mark on his father’s wrist, that magical black ink now the color of ash. Whenever John caught him looking, he would pull his sleeve down quick and change the subject. Dean saw the mark on his brother’s shoulder, the way it grew as he did, always tying him to some future love.

Everyone has a soulmate. It was the sort of thing you could count on, the counter to all the death and loss in the world. Everyone has a soulmate and a unique mark tying them to that person. Everyone except Dean Winchester. But Dean has bigger things to worry about with a kid to keep safe and endless dangers lurking in the dark, and he knows better than to ask his dad about it. So he drinks too much in shitty bars and lets girls do whatever they will to him, and he enjoys it, he really does. Until someone asks to see his mark. They want to compare, as if hoping they’ll find their soulmate in the sticky bathroom of a no name dive.

He told one of them once, when he was seventeen. She was a blonde with heels that made her taller than him, and she was pressed against the brick wall of an alleyway, all breathless smile, asking to see it. She bit her lip, and Dean exhaled, and he told her that he didn’t have one.

“Come on,” she said. “We don’t have to be forever, I just wanna see it.” Dean didn’t say anything. He could feel his face turning red as her expression changed. “You’re serious?” Dean looked at the ground as she took a step away and flattened out her skirt. “Uh, look, I just realized....I’ve gotta go.”

Dean didn’t tell anyone after that. He didn’t talk about it at all except once. Sam was only thirteen, but he had his first girlfriend. Dean groaned when he heard, knowing it would be his job to pick up the broken hearted kid when they inevitably had to leave in three months. Still, he tried not to say anything until they were in the room one day and Sam asked, “Uh, Dean?”

“What?” He stirred the spaghettios on the stove without looking up.

“Why don’t you have a mark?”

Dean held the spoon in mid air, his skin going cold. He swallowed and without looking up said, “Because I don’t have a soulmate. Don’t ask stupid questions.”

Dean Winchester didn’t have a soulmate. He knew it when he was seven and learning to shoot rock salt, when he was sixteen and doing whatever it took to find food for his brother, when he was twenty-three and sewing his own wounds back together. It made sense, after all. Isn’t that why everyone always left him? He was destined to be alone. He had made his peace with it, with a little help from the beer and the whiskey, and after Sam and John had both left, when the motel rooms started to feel just a little bit too empty, there was always a bar and a woman inside who might help him forget for a little while that he was supposed to be alone.

And when there wasn’t a woman, sometimes there was someone else. A gray-haired guy in the shadows of a bar who looked at him a little different, or a hunter like him who seemed almost as messed up, dragging him into a vacant motel. It was just another thing he wouldn’t allow himself to think about, much less talk about, just like the emptiness of his skin.

Then John stopped answering the phone, and Dean recruited his little brother back into the life he always hated. Their life went from easy credit card scams and fast food grease to an endless series of crises that meant Dean had no time to think about soulmates, and the secret he would take to his grave was that when he saw that grayed mark on Sam’s shoulder every day, a part of him was glad that he didn’t have to be alone anymore.

Dean knew it was horrible. He wanted to grind himself into dust for thinking it when he could see the grief pulling Sam apart, the same grief that had destroyed their father, but he didn’t care. Dean knew he was meant to be alone because he knew that deep down there was something broken inside of him, something no amount of Led Zeppelin or one night stands could fix.

Still, a part of him wondered, so the day they drove back into Lawrence and met Missouri, Dean told Sam he left his wallet in the house and went back inside. Missouri didn’t seem surprised as Dean stood faltering in her living room.

“Well, spit it out, boy.” Missouri gave him a pointed look.

“What do you know about soulmate marks?” Dean asked. Missouri let out a bit of a sigh.

“I know that they are powerful and unchangeable. That they are destiny’s mark, and that you don’t have one.”

Dean didn’t know what to say as she gave him a knowing look. Finally, he asked, “Why?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

Dean already knew that he had to end up alone, that he wasn’t anything real to anyone. He needed to hear it. He nodded.

“You have no soulmate, Dean Winchester,” Missouri said carefully, “because the being that you will be tied to has no soul.”

Dean’s blood went cold. His hands were numb. Soulless? He had spent his entire life killing anything that wasn’t human, yet he was destined to be with something unnatural. The truth of it sank down his throat. He wasn’t just broken. He was a monster too.

He would tell no one, ever. Not even Sam could know this. He tried not to think of what John would say. Dean Winchester left Missouri Mosley’s house with a secret, and he drowned it that night in a bottle. He got up the next morning to fight the fight he had always been in.

The broken man broke again, little by little with each mistake that he etched into his skin.

Dean fought to be different than what he knew he was. He fought to save everyone he could. He fought to save himself, but he lost. The hellhounds dragged him away in the end, and Dean learned exactly how much of a monster he really was.

Then there was darkness, and dirt in his mouth, and the feeling of sunlight on his hands as he clawed his way through. Dean pulled himself out of his own grave and walked with asphalt under his feet until he found a gas station. There was the handprint seared onto his skin, marking him in a way Dean did not understand. There was the shattered glass, and Bobby, and Sam acting unlike himself, and so many questions that led him to a barn in Illinois, and some terrifying unknown.

There was the thing, and Dean’s knife in its chest, and the thing saying  _ you don’t think you deserve to be saved _ , a truth that made Dean want to disintegrate. This thing had marked him, had saved him, had looked into his very soul. Maybe this was proof there was one in there after all.

The righteous man learned that he had a destiny bigger than any birthmark could have predicted, and that he didn’t want any part of it.

Dean Winchester met angels and demons and too many monsters to count. He killed things that would stop other people in their tracks, and he did it without blinking. He did as much good as he was able, but it was never enough. It never washed out the bad he had done too, whether intentional or not. But through all the blood and dirt and resurrection, there was Sam and the family they built. There was Cas.

Cas, who was no longer of God or Heaven. Cas, who had been burned the moment he touched Dean in Hell. Cas, who had scorched his skin with a handprint that Dean could still feel the ghost of. He was made of mistakes just like Dean, and Dean hadn’t always been able to forgive him the way he wanted to. Instead, he prayed. Cas was the person—He wasn’t really a person, though, even now, but did it matter? Dean never felt like one either.

It took Dean Winchester forty years to relax into the softer parts of himself. It took a home, and a few apocalypses, meeting people like him, meeting Claire, and so much death to let himself be soft. To admit the things he wanted. He only said them to himself, these selfish confessions. This was the irony, of course. That all these years he had been so afraid of his future with a soulless thing: a demon, an incubus, a siren, his own desires. And here was this twice fallen angel sitting across the table, rolling his eyes and caring so deeply. Still, he was an angel, and that was the curse. That the darkness inside Dean would love a holy thing, a thing incapable of even feeling that way in return. Dean knew it could not happen. His skin had always been blank for a reason.

But then.

He was left in an empty room. He was left alone again. He was saved again. Saved by Cas’ love, for him of all things. They had spent so many years fighting destiny, and in one moment Dean suddenly understood why he never had the mark. Destiny hadn’t given him a soulmate. He had carved it out of her dead hands, claimed it and bared his teeth at anyone who threatened it like the monster he had always been.  _ What about all of this is real? We are. _

The faithless man learned there were some things worth believing in.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this post](https://casisalamp.tumblr.com/post/637143620682645504/soulmate-au-idea-where-dean-is-revealed-to-not).
> 
> I haven't written spn fic in so long, but it has obviously dominated my conscious thoughts since November 5th, so here we are. Also, Sam's soulmate mark is shared with Jess because his destiny as Lucifer's vessel required them to meet and fall in love. He does not have one with Eileen because he was not "meant" to meet her, let alone fall in love. But make no mistake, this is a Saileen household.
> 
> thanks for reading! [buy me a coffee if you enjoyed it?](https://ko-fi.com/bluestbluetoeverblue#achievementUnlockedModal) xoxo


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